3G Wireless Communication System: The Design Challenge
The engineer of the next generation of wireless communication systems (UMTS) faces the challenge to design systems of unprecedented complexity in a very short time span. While the enormous progress made in semiconductor technology makes it possible to fabricate chips of M x 10 Mio. gates we are still far from a proven design methodology to handle this complexity. The problem is further aggravated by a serious lack of a new bread of engineers that understand their task as an interactive process of jointly optimizing algorithm and architectural design. In this talk we address a few aspects of this highly complex design space which not only comprises technological but also economical issues. Algorithm design today is the task of finding implementable solutions which operate very close to the theoretical optimum. This implies a very profound knowledge of communication-, information-, and estimation theory. In this speaker's view there is no substitute for a sound understanding of theory which has to be complemented by a knowledge of system simulation principles. The implementation of SOC (System-on-a-Chip) involves mapping data flow (DSP) and control functionality on a suitable architecture , taking into account issues such as quantization effects, power consumption, etc. The question of which functionality is implemented in hardware or software is of ever increasing importance (HW/SW-Codesign). There exists no straight forward recipe to solve this problem. The next large improvement in design productivity will come from the use of high-level programming languages for DSP application as apposed to assembly language programming. Recent research results and new approaches toward efficient DSP compilers will be discussed. In order to be specific we will make use of real-world examples in this presentation.